Shopify Pickup Points & Missing Phone Numbers: Solving the Mondial Relay Checkout Conundrum

Hey store owners!

Let's talk about something that can really throw a wrench in your fulfillment process: missing customer phone numbers on pickup orders. It's a frustrating situation, especially when you've done everything right on your end, setting fields as 'required' in your Shopify admin, only to find customers are still skipping them at checkout.

This exact scenario recently popped up in the Shopify Community, brought to light by a French merchant, @TPELUCHEFACTORY, who uses Shopify's native integration with Mondial Relay for pickup points. Their story is a familiar one: everything was running smoothly, with every pickup order coming in with both email and phone. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, the phone number field for pickup point deliveries became optional, while it remained mandatory for home deliveries. The result? Broken automation for label generation and a lot of manual follow-up emails.

The Head-Scratcher: Why Your "Required" Setting Isn't Working

TPELUCHEFACTORY's main concern was that despite setting the delivery phone number as required in their Shopify admin, it wasn't being enforced for Mondial Relay pickup orders. This is where the community really dug in, and a crucial insight came from @lumine, highlighting a subtle but significant distinction in how Shopify handles different types of orders:

• The "Required" toggle you set in Shopify admin typically applies to the shipping address form.
• For a pickup point order (like Mondial Relay), the "shipping address" on the order actually becomes the pickup point itself, not the buyer's personal address.

This means the field governed by your "required" setting might not be the customer's phone number that your labels actually need! It's a detail that's easy to overlook but can completely derail your automation.

Debunking the Payment Processor Myth (and a Shop Pay Twist)

One of the initial leads TPELUCHEFACTORY explored was a recent switch from Stripe to Shopify Payments. Many community members, including @Custom-Cursor and @Steve_TopNewYork, quickly clarified that payment providers generally don't control shipping address field logic. TPELUCHEFACTORY even confirmed that switching back to Stripe didn't resolve the issue.

However, @lumine offered a nuanced perspective: while the payment switch isn't a direct cause, moving off Stripe often enables Shop Pay and other express wallet buttons. These can prefill customer information from saved profiles. If a customer's saved Shop Pay profile doesn't have a phone number, then an order placed via Shop Pay might come through without one, bypassing your checkout form settings entirely. It's a clever observation that could explain some of those truly missing numbers.

Immediate Action: Checking Your Order Data

Before you dive into complex solutions, it's essential to understand exactly where the phone number (or lack thereof) is sitting on your orders. Here's what @lumine suggested:

1. Compare Order Types: Open a recent Mondial Relay pickup order and a recent home delivery order side-by-side in your Shopify admin.
2. Examine Phone Field Location: For the home delivery order, the phone number is usually on the shipping address. For the relay order, check the customer record and the billing address as well.
3. Identify the Discrepancy: If the phone number is present on the customer record or billing address for pickup orders, it means nothing broke at checkout. Your label generation step might just be looking in the wrong field. This is the "cheap outcome" and the easiest to fix by adjusting your label template or app settings.

Workarounds & Solutions When It's Truly Missing

If, after your investigation, the phone number is genuinely absent everywhere for pickup orders, you're not alone. The community discussion highlighted that for "hard enforcement" of a phone number specifically for pickup point orders, there isn't a simple native toggle. This often points towards a need for more advanced checkout validation, which might depend on your Shopify plan and utilize Checkout Extensibility.

However, there's a valuable temporary fix suggested by @websensepro and acknowledged by TPELUCHEFACTORY: Shopify Flow automation.

Setting Up a Shopify Flow Automation (Temporary Fix):

This won't force customers to enter a phone number, but it will protect your fulfillment flow by flagging orders that are missing the crucial data:

1. Go to Shopify Flow: From your Shopify admin, navigate to Apps > Shopify Flow. (If you don't have it, it's a free app you can install.)
2. Create a New Workflow: Click "Create workflow."
3. Set the Trigger: Choose "Order created."
4. Add a Condition: Click "Add condition" and set it up to check for orders placed via Mondial Relay where the customer's phone number is blank.
   • Condition 1: Order > Shipping method > Name contains "Mondial Relay" (or whatever specific name your Mondial Relay shipping option uses).
   • Condition 2 (AND): Customer > Phone is blank.
5. Define the Action: If these conditions are met, you can set an action like:
   • Add a Tag: Add a tag like "Missing Phone" to the order.
   • Send an Internal Email: Notify your fulfillment team to contact the customer.
   • Pause Fulfillment: If you use fulfillment apps, you might be able to pause the fulfillment process for these orders.
6. Save and Turn On: Give your workflow a descriptive name and activate it.

This workaround helps you catch problematic orders before you waste time trying to generate failed labels, giving you a chance to manually collect the missing information.

What About Shopify & Mondial Relay Support?

The community thread also highlighted a frustrating back-and-forth with support. TPELUCHEFACTORY reached out to Mondial Relay, who stated they don't manage anything on Shopify's site. Then, after an hour-long discussion with Shopify Support, they were told it was Mondial Relay's issue. This kind of blame game is incredibly unhelpful for merchants caught in the middle.

It underscores the complexity of native integrations and how different parts of the platform interact. Since it's a native Shopify integration, many in the community, including TPELUCHEFACTORY, felt Shopify should have more control over the checkout behavior.

Ultimately, this discussion shows that while there isn't a magic "fix-all" button for this specific Mondial Relay pickup phone number issue, understanding the underlying mechanics of Shopify's checkout and leveraging tools like Shopify Flow can help you manage the problem effectively. Keep an eye on Shopify updates, especially around Checkout Extensibility, as these areas are constantly evolving and might offer more direct solutions in the future. And as always, sharing your experiences in the community helps everyone navigate these tricky situations!